Posted on 07/27/2003 4:38:17 AM PDT by Liz
Maybe we should give an award for mangled quotes of the year. Misquotations are becoming a regular feature of journalism and politics, partly out of carelessness, but mostly because anything-goes partisanship so deeply afflicts our discourse.
So here are the nominees for the first award:
The Associated Press, for butchering a line from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the Texas sodomy decision. The AP quoted Scalia saying he has "nothing against homosexuals." This misquote was endlessly recycled in the news, usually to mock Scalia for a gay version of "some of my best friends are Jews." What Scalia actually wrote was: "I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means." He wasn't offering his feelings about gays. He was talking about the rights of all groups to organize and lobby.
Maureen Dowd, for quoting President Bush in her May 14 New York Times column saying, "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated ... They're not a problem any more." Here's the full Bush quote, without the misleading ellipsis: "Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely, being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they're not a problem any more."
The BBC, probably the most relentlessly anti-American organization in Britain, for recently altering a transcript of one of its own stories, thus misquoting itself. The story dealt with Park Jong-lin, a 70-year-old veteran of the Korean War who "served in the North Korean Army fighting against the imperialist American aggressors and their South Korean accomplices." In the altered version, quote marks now surround "imperialist American aggressors" and the BBC's reference to "accomplices" was changed to "allies." The BBC, by the way, falsely reported the Jessica Lynch rescue as a made-for-TV special faked with U.S. soldiers firing blanks for the cameras.
The Democrats, for a TV ad in Madison, Wis., misquoting President Bush's uranium reference in his state of the union message. The Republicans have offered so many conflicting versions of Bush's now famous 16 words that you would think the Democrats wouldn't have bothered to remove the first six words crediting (or blaming) British intelligence for the uranium-from-Africa report. But they did. The ad has Bush saying flatly, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The French, for changing a remark made Monday by President Jacques Chirac. In Malaysia to meet with Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamed, Chirac called for multilateralism in world affairs, then added: "We can no longer accept the law of the strongest, the law of the jungle." When a reporter called the Elysee Palace to ask about the reference, he found that the quote showed up on their transcript as, "We can no longer accept the evolution of men, the world, we can no longer accept the simple law of the strongest." Oh, so Chirac wasn't attacking America or the war in Iraq. He was just sharing his abstract opinion on faulty evolutionary theories and social Darwinism.
So who deserves the award? One vote here for the AP. It can't be that the reporter somehow failed to notice the second half of Scalia's sentence. At Slate, Dalia Lithwick wrote that this was "a case of the media getting a quote completely wrong and disseminating it so that it becomes universally believed."
Give the award to the AP. It's a statuette of Nathan Hale, with his famous quote, "I regret that I have but one life."
Yup. Like when W mention "Niger" in the "16 word sentence" in the State of the Union address. What a bunch of crap!
Perfect!
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